The Public School Writer strikes again. (thanks, Secular Right for the link)

Typically.

What starts off as a defence of free speech ends up placing the blame on the threshold of democracy. The excellent Secular Right dissects this article wonderfully; that saves me time to devote this entry to examine the more disgraceful bits.

Saith he:

Other nations wearing some of the emblems of Western modernity - secularism, democracy, a free-market economy - hardly offer any guarantees of free speech. Consider, for example, China, India and Russia, three multiethnic and officially secular nation-states that are experimenting with variations on the free-market economy.

How true. The fact that Mishra wrote this hate-pamphlet about anti-free speech India is itself the remarkable example that India tolerates free speech and dissent: no party or group of people–least of all the “saffron fundamentalists” whom he insidiously compares to the Taliban clerics–ever did as much as even file a civil suit against him. It only goes to prove Secular Right’s assessment of the man’s deep-rooted hatred of India; hatred rooted in inferiority and intensified by establishments like the JNU and St. Stephen’s. Comparing Red China with India is preposterous to say the least. But how a free-market economy foments an aversion to free speech beats my reasoning. But MishraSpeak becomes clear when in the next paragraph he states that

In all these countries, a growing middle class turned a blind eye to, or even actively supported, the suppression of ethnic minorities in the name of national unity.

Mishra’s angst against the middle class is understandable–it is shared to varying degrees by the Communists. The Middle Class is anathema to the Leftists because it is almost the immediate receptor of the benefits of free markets–liberalization, in the Indian context . And a growing middle class doesn’t really buy the hollow theories that Mishra and his likes propound. A strong middle class is the nightmare of the many socialist hogs that decorate the Congress party and Communists today because it demands accountability. The best, and most contemporary illustration of this is the battle between Deve Gowda and the IT industry. An overwhelming percentage of the achievers, makers, and movers of the Indian IT industry hail from the middle class while Gowda and his various friends like Harkishen Surjeet at the opposite end of the spectrum are averse to accountability of any kind.

As example of the violence-abetting middle class, he utters the mandatory lie on Kashmir in this context:

In democratic India, up to 70,000 people have died in Kashmir in a violent insurgency that the Indian news media have yet to honestly reckon with.

What about the 400000 Kashmiri Pandits who were killed and/or driven out of the Valley of Fear?

Or take the recent plight of the Kashmiri Pandits. Over 400,000 Kashmiri Pandits have been forced to flee their homeland. Many Pandit men, women and children have been brutally murdered. About 70,000 still languish in makeshift refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. Scores of temples in Kashmir have been desecrated, destroyed, looted, more than 900 educational institutions have been attacked by terrorists. Properties of Pandits have been vandalised, businesses destroyed or taken over, even hospitals have not been spared.

(Rediff)

They don’t count, Mishra is only interested in hammering home the point about the suppression of “ethnic minorities” followed by a more dangerous assertion:

Traditional religion hardly played a role in the unprecedented violence of the 20th century, which was largely caused by secular ideologies - Nazism and Communism.

By selectively focussing on 20th century violence, does he seek to erase/whitewash centuries of bloodbath carried out in the name of religion? What about the Armenian Genocide, which Mishra himself mentions at the beginning of his article? Aren’t 1.5 million human lives enough? Or what about the Jewish massacre in 1929 on the orders of the Grand Murderer Mufti? And what about the example of Kashmir I cited above? Or about the daily doses of violence in the name of Islam–a hundred killed in Karachi, 48 in the Gateway of India blast, tens killed in Afghanistan, a dozen vehicles blown up in Iraq, bombing in Bali, Spain, London, and the latest wave of violence in France and Australia? What does all this add up to? Even by MishraSpeak standards, these don’t count as secular ideology-based violence.

Or does Mishra play the numbers game, which takes into account only those incidents where the number of people murdered is “sufficiently large” as in the case of Nazism/Communism?

It is my view that the inspiration, the motive power behind large-scale, organized violence is one: totalitarianism. The difference lies merely in terminology–religion, Nazism, Communism–the underlying characteristic is one: absolute domination and tyranny. Absolute Power and its sustenance by any means. Trying to explain this away yields nothing except brownie points from people who regularly pat Mishra on the back. Not to mention the hefty cheques that enable him to globe-trot.

Lastly, he asserts that

In America, it was at least partly the fear of being perceived as unpatriotic that held back the freest news media in the world from rigorously questioning the official justification for and conduct of the war in Iraq.

Right. What about the million Noam Chomskys, Arundhati Roys (if memory serves me right, she received several “peace foundation” awards for bashing the Iraq war), and Michael Moores? Wasn’t their questioning enough by Mishra’s standards of rigourousness?

Postscript: The brief author profile at the end of this NYT op-ed reads:

Pankaj Mishra is the author, most recently, of “An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.”

It’d be fitting if the NYT puts an end to its readers’ suffering if it stops inflicting Mishra on our sensibilities.